


Julia

by Unchained_Daisychain



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Drinking to Cope, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fist Fights, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, One Shot, References to Depression, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, also he doesn't rlly like cops or their cars, idk john is trying his best and paul just wants to be there for him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 19:09:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20441048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unchained_Daisychain/pseuds/Unchained_Daisychain
Summary: It's been a little over a month since she left John, but the wound is still as raw as yesterday's touch.-He hasn’t looked out his window or opened its curtains in days. He can picture it, though: leaves brittle and colorless tumbling down the street by the cold howl of the wind; little boys clinging to their mothers’ hands, struggling to chase those clacking heels because to be abandoned so young is a primal fear; people on the street with faces as flimsy as the newspapers in their hands glancing over at Mimi’s doll-house home and thinking,That poor Lennon boy.





	Julia

**Author's Note:**

> **Ask:** "There’s never enough angst/comfort of the two dealing with Julia’s death in my opinion. So maybe something dealing with that for writing something with angst?"
> 
> so a couple (many) months ago on tumblr, i posted smth saying i really wanted to write smth angsty for some reason and welcomed ppl to drop some prompts in my ask box. well i got this one and immediately knew i was gonna do it, but since this is such a tragic moment in their lives i rlly wanted to do it justice and think about how I wanted things to unfold. one of the first things i ever wrote was about Julia's death, but in hindsight it's just plain shitty, so I wanted to put my all into my last shot at this.
> 
> thanks so much to the anon who suggested this; i'm sorry it took so long to get around to it, but like i said, i wanted to rlly try my best on this topic. 
> 
> personally i can't even imagine losing a parent so suddenly and tragically, but i tried tapping into that empathetic part of myself and gauging how i would feel. my heart aches for them.
> 
> happy reading?

“You been out today?”

“No.”

John stares stale-eyed at the ceiling. Everyday it seems lower and lower, only days away from crushing him. 

Paul looks at him from the foot of the bed, sat there like the mattress is made of wood. He’s uncomfortable, doesn’t know what to do with himself, and John can tell. Had smelled it on him as soon as he walked in the room. 

“When you last been out?”

He shrugs. 

He’s still in the same pyjamas he has worn for the past three days straight, and at six in the evening both his hair and teeth are still unbrushed. For days he has lain there imagining the frigid touch of death. His bed a coffin, his blankets the dirt, his room the grave, his body lifeless and bloodless as he holds his breath. But his heart, pounding—_bragging _ defiantly against his ribs, always shatters the illusion.

“Well…why don’t we go now?” Paul suggests chirpily.

“S’almost dark,” he mumbles, but doesn’t even know if it’s true. 

He hasn’t looked out his window or opened its curtains in days. He can picture it, though: leaves brittle and colorless tumbling down the street by the cold howl of the wind; little boys clinging to their mothers’ hands, struggling to chase those clacking heels because to be abandoned so young is a primal fear; people on the street with faces as flimsy as the newspapers in their hands glancing over at Mimi’s doll-house home and thinking, _ That poor Lennon boy. _

“That’s alright,” Paul says, “we’ve still got an hour or so left. We don’t have to go far if you don’t want.”

And God, John knows he’s trying. He already snapped at him for cleaning and sorting things around his room when he came in, didn’t want to hear him playing the guitar either. For weeks he’s been nothing but difficult, yet blows his top when someone confront him about it. _ You think just cos your mum’s dead it gives ye the right to be a cunt?; Sort out yer shit, Lennon, cause Julia ain’t comin’ back. _Every remark, every last one of them, ended with a fist to the face.

Sighing, John throws the covers off himself, disrupting the dirt and death-worms, and leaves the room without a word. Minimally he fixes himself up. At least takes the time to scrub the taste of death from his mouth and pushes his hair into a half-arsed quiff on top of his head. 

Paul steps into the doorway of the loo and watches him stare at his empty face in the mirror. He rubs at his eyes, smearing the rusted copper of pennies once placed there. He wonders if his face would shatter should he smile again. He can’t remember the last time he did it.

“You look good,” Paul says with a small smile.

John flicks the light off and slips past him without a word or look. Silence slowly smothers them as Paul picks up on his disinclination to talk. Everything feels thrown off kilter. No fervent touches, no longing glances. 

It’s only a matter of time before Paul leaves him too for being such an insufferable prick.

John places his hand on the door knob, hesitates, then turns around and kisses Paul. His fingers curl slightly into the thick hair above his nape like it’s a lifeline. There’s nothing special, just a soft-lipped touch that fills John with enough courage to walk back into the bottomless grey world. Hopefully it also imparts to Paul the apologies he can’t quite express yet. Words gather in his mouth like vinegar and cough medicine, too thick to be swallowed or spit out. Just sitting…coagulating.

His mind screams for relief.

He sighs and opens the door.

* * *

“I was thinkin’ we’d go somewhere quieter, y’know?” Paul leans across the table to shout over the blaring jukebox.

“What’s wrong with this?” John asks, disinterested, as he lights himself a smoke.

“Can’t really talk in here, can we?”

He waves out his match, shrugs. “Don’t wanna talk.”

The pubs have everything he needs: booze, a clamor that makes conversation nearly impossible, an energy that gets his blood stirring dangerously. It should come as no surprise he chose a place that would only encourage his self-destructive spiral.

“John, c’mon,” Paul pleads, eyes grey with desperation. “I just wanna—”

“Help, I know.” Brusquely he stands from the table, mutters, “‘M gettin’ drinks.” 

Because those are the only thing that really help. When he drinks it feels like the alcohol is slipping between all of his cracks and clogging him up. From a bird’s eye view he’ll watch himself, knowing that that raving, hotheaded arsehole only wants to feel whole again. Knowing that when he’s sober he’ll realize he accomplished nothing at all.

While he waits for two rum and Cokes at the counter, his eyes roam over the gyrating bodies around him. Parts of her are in every person in the place. Her strawberry red hair bobbing around like a cardinal in flight; her joyful and shining eyes staring back at him from the face of the barkeep; her laugh, more recognizable than the music, drifting from far across the pub and fooling John into turning his head in hopes of catching just one last glimpse of her. 

His temper piques the longer he’s left waiting there.

Stubbing out his cigarette, he shouts to the middle-aged woman behind the counter, “Where’s the fuckin’ drinks, darling?”

With a glare she rudely slides his order to him, his mother’s eyes now vanished from her sockets and replaced with unfeeling lumps of coal. Just to get under her skin even more he tosses back one of the drinks and demands a refill on the spot.

When he returns to the table Paul is idly chipping away at a fingernail but looks up with a smile as John sets the drinks down. “They got Chuck Berry on the juke,” he says jovially. “I put ‘im on for you.”

“Ta.”

Paul scratches his neck, eyes downcast.

Their silence, louder than the excitement of the pub but quieter than the whimper of his heart, only reminds John why he didn’t even want to leave the house. The people make him feel just as lonely as the isolation. He has to watch the faces—faces with mothers and fathers—scamper by poised in blissful obliviousness. Faces unmarred by loss and tragedy and everything which stomps heavy-booted upon the precious things in life.

A whole month he’s carried around this shell of John Lennon. Burdensome and chipped, but not in a way that offers hope of breaking free. Chipped in a way that the shards lacerate his skin like daggers and he cries out for someone to see past his hollow eyes and into the face of the scared little boy trapped inside.

They dance and they dance.

He drinks and he drinks.

With those same vacant eyes John looks at Paul’s mouth. Like a ventriloquist dummy, he sees his lips moving but hears none of the words spoken. When he steps back into the moment it feels like flipping to a random page in a book. 

“—go for, like, a walk or somethin’—”

“What?” he interrupts suddenly, curtly.

Paul blinks at him. “Huh?”

“What’re you on about?”

“Oh.” His face drops, pulling John’s stomach with it. “Nothing, just…nothing.”

He downs the rest of his drink, numbs himself some more. “Right.”

His acrimony is a spoonful of something vile and unpalatable that he’s having trouble swallowing. He knows it’ll benefit him most if he just plugs his nose and takes it, but he spits it out every time and Paul just so happens to be at the receiving end of it. 

He doesn’t deserve it. 

But then again, not everyone deserves the shitty hands they’re dealt in life, do they?

“Look, we can go back if you want,” Paul tries. “I thought—I dunno, I thought it might be good to get out.”

“I’m already here now,” he tells him firmly. “We’re staying.”

Beneath the table a foot slides alongside John’s own like an apology. He clenches his jaw and pretends not to feel it.

* * *

It doesn’t take long for him to cut the bullshit and start ordering straight shots of whiskey. 

On an empty stomach they hit him hard and fast—venomous brown snakes hissing in his bloodstream. He can’t remember the last time he ate or even felt hunger, and he wants to keep that forgetfulness with him, wrap himself inside of it like a thick coat.

At the counter he waits for his fourth-fifth-sixth drink.

_ When you’re feeling down keep your liquor brown, _ his mind singsongs drunkenly.

There’s a man trapped in the bottom of every glass—gasping, drowning. His blunt fingernails claw up the sides just to keep his head above the roaring amber sea; his gut-wrenching cries are heard in the clinking ice. If John drinks enough he can save him. When he drinks too much he becomes him. 

On the stool beside him a head of red hair sits down, the same one he’s been spotting like an apparition around the pub—phantom-shade, bodiless. It levitates in the air in front of him, so intensely bright that his eyes burn. And if he thinks about crying, it isn’t because of the way Julia’s hair danced around her shoulders like the dying light of a fire or, when they embraced, the way it smelled of a fifth, unknown season that nature gifted specifically to her.

It isn’t because of that at all. 

“You’ve got beautiful hair,” John says, hand reaching out, entranced and thoughtless, to sacrifice itself to the flames. When they lick at his fingers he feels no pain.

“Thank you,” she laughs meekly, spitting fire, and the rest of her face finally ripples into focus.

In one jarring second John realizes no beauty compares with that of a mother’s.

“What about mine, then?” comes a deep voice from behind. 

Nearly smirking sadistically to himself, John turns around. 

Behind him is a bloke who looks like he has a few years on him and definitely has a few inches. Bullet-hole eyes, unblinking and gun-metal grey, stare at him from a face fit for a bulldog. Intimidation angles the jut of his chin, but John doesn’t buy his hackneyed tough-guy tactics for a minute.

As for his hair, well….

“Gonna be honest with you, mate, it’s not really doin’ much for me.”

“A comedian, eh?” He unfolds his tree-trunk arms, nods at the fingers John still has curled around the burning tips of the bird’s hair. “Look, why don’t you go ahead and take yer hand off my girl, yeah?”

John raises his eyebrows. “And if I don’t?”

The want of a confrontation itches like a rash in the creases of his palms. Part of him had hoped she had a boyfriend hovering nearby. All night he’s been looking for a reason to tear into someone, to unleash the feral beast of his rage, and this bastard, with his face begging for a kiss from John’s fist, unwittingly took the bait. 

Brow puckering into a frown, the bloke leans in closer. “If you don’t, then I’ll fuckin’ do it for you. Can tell you right now that ain’t the way you want things done.”

John snorts. “I’ll take my chances.”

Before he gets another lock twirled around his finger, a beefy pair of hands grab him by the collar and sling him to the floor. The bloke comes down after him and they grapple with each other like apes. A right hook clocks John straight in the cheek, but he wouldn’t even know it if his head didn’t snap with the follow-through. Another strike to his nose and crystals explode behind his eyes.

Jaw clenched, John wrestles his way on top and, summoning like a beast the pain of a body launched across the street and the pain of an orphaned boy identifying its corpse, whales punch after punch to that smug fucking face. Blood blooms slow but plentiful from crevices he doesn’t even remember hitting. It fuels him, the damage done—the way he can rearrange someone’s face into a physical embodiment of the state of his heart. Beaten and bruised and weeping tears masquerading as blood.

Hands wrench his clothes with vigilante strength and voices shout from far-off corridors an amalgamation of encouragements and protests. But he can’t stop. His fists hammer and hammer until he’s almost certain a few teeth have been fashioned into calcic rings. 

_ I’m fully prepared to kill this lad, _ he thinks and it’s the hardest blow to the head he has taken yet. 

This time when someone finally drags him away, he lets them.

And of course that person is Paul of all people.

Outside the air is heavy as his blows and the night as surly as his spirits. Only now does the fight catch up to him, as one corner of his face begins to ache and the pain spreads like a singular throb to his ribs. He wipes his nose and mouth on the back of his hand, smearing blood across it like a tribal marking. 

“I coulda killed ‘im, Macca—I coulda _ fuckin’ _ killed ‘im!” he rants, but now he’s furious he didn’t get the chance to. 

“John, yer pissed,” Paul says, as though being sober would make any difference.

But John doesn’t hear him anyway over the thundering in his ears. He spits into the street, stains the pavement scarlet.

“I think we should go home now.”

“Christ, stop fuckin’ _ tiptoein’ _ around me and just have the bollocks to—”

Out of nowhere, like a cloaked horseman riding heavy-hoofed out of the shadows, a police car cruises down the street. 

John’s mind blanks. 

With stony eyes he tracks it. The black whisper of death. The accessory of murder. The last thing his mum ever saw.

Is there still a dent in the bonnet? Still a crack in the windscreen? Still a murderer behind the wheel?

For the second time that night his vision reddens.

A congregation of abandoned beer bottles lean against the brick wall. John equips himself with one and hurls it down the street after the car. Like an exploding star, it shatters into glistening pieces just below the bumper.

“Fucking cunts!” he yells at it with every last breath in his lungs, hoping the words travel farther than the bottle and crack every single window. 

In an abrupt stop the tires squeal like hellhounds and the brake lights glow red as Satan’s eyes, peering all the way down the street. And John is so fucking _ incensed _ that he wants to storm over there and beat the shit out of the officer too. Wants to get behind the wheel and give one of them a taste of their own medicine. And he’d get off the hook for it too because he’s drunk, right?

He moves to grab another bottle, but Paul jerks at his arm yelling something he can’t hear.

The officer steps out of the car.

The bottle slips from his hand.

They bolt.

* * *

Several ill-lit streets away they catch their breaths. Paul walks with arms akimbo and face upturned while John clutches his sore side with a frown. All of his energy and rage has leached out of his body from their sudden lamming. Now he feels hollow—tipped over and emptied out with the purposeful efforts of filling himself spilling tar-black and runny onto the sleeping grass. 

He wouldn’t wish this feeling on anyone.

“Wait, c’mere, lemme—lemme see yer face,” Paul says from a few steps behind him, still panting.

Too exhausted to protest, John stops and turns around.

With a frown Paul gently cradles his face, turns it this way and that to inspect the damage done. “Shit, babe,” he whispers as he touches John’s bruised cheek, taps his busted nose.

John winces and Paul murmurs an apology before pulling the tail of his t-shirt up to dab at the small cuts. The concern in his eyes does something ineffable to John and he bites his tongue to keep from tearing up. What’s there to bloody cry about? The fact that someone cares about him, that someone has stuck around and _ keeps _ sticking around even through all of his recklessness and stupidity?

Fuck.

He lightly pushes Paul’s hands away and continues walking down the street.

On the pavement, before every step he takes, are the shadows of his footprints, yet to be laid but somehow marking exactly where they’ll land. Even sober he would still hear the ghostly whisper of his name, crafting a crooked and beckoning finger of it in the August air; but only drunk would he answer the call.

The second Paul starts to realize where they’re headed, he slows down, jabbing a thumb towards the opposite direction. “Hey, why don’t we head back the other way?”

“You wanted to go somewhere quiet, right?” John mutters. His fingers wrap around one of the metal poles coiling like cobras on the cemetery gates. “What’s quieter than death?”

Paul grabs him around the wrist as he pushes it open. He doesn’t turn around.

But he can still see the hesitance written in hasty letters across Paul’s face as he says, “I don’t think you’re ready for this yet, love.”

“Yeah, well, ‘m never gonna be ready, so what’s the difference?”

He breaks his wrist free and goes inside.

The grounds are empty and still, but no matter where John goes these days he feels eyes on him. The tombstone eyes, the watchful night—they all know what happened. They all mock him for it. As he walks the rows, feet devastatingly aware of their destination, he tries not to think about the bodies below his feet and the memories trapped in the earth. He almost feels sick to his stomach but isn’t sure whether it’s the alcohol or the unease inherent in a cemetery.

His feet stop.

Three stones away, small and straight-shouldered and so largely indistinct that it feels an injustice to who she was, sits Julia’s grave. 

He keeps his distance from it, puts a triad of lives in between them like he’s building a wall. All night he’s tried building walls. Booze barricades and tombstone towers. Any and everything to maintain the illusion and dissociate from the pain. But the harder he works the more it cracks, and now he finds himself just feet away from the only woman who will ever break his heart twice.

He chews on his lip and forces himself not to cry. 

_ He looked up from his guitar and caught her watching…always watching. With a playful smirk she ducked back behind the doorway, the velvet curtain of her hair flowing behind her. _

_ He laughed and she slowly came back into view. Her smile was so beautiful, as though she forever held rose stems between her teeth; a smile that made him believe in angels. _

_ “You’re very talented, darling,” she said, plopping down beside him. “You’ll be a big rock n’ roll singer someday and I’ll be right there in the front row screaming, ‘I told you so! I told you so!’” _

_ His smile widened as the roars filled his ears and the spotlights twinkled in his eyes and his sights landed on her—impossible to miss in a crowd. _

_ “Promise?” he asked, because he still never really knew. _

_ She walked her slender, red-tipped fingers up his arm and tickled his neck. _

_ “Promise,” she whispered, because this time she meant it. _

He blinks.

Tears pour down his cheeks.

“Twice.” He shakes his head, eyes on the grave, as the tears spill like rivers down his face now. “She left me twice. Why did she always leave me, why didn’t she want me—?!”

Arms suddenly embrace him and his walls collapse. With a heart-wrenching sob he buries his face into Paul’s shoulder, tastes his own sorrow as it soaks into the t-shirt and wets his lips. And he _ hates _ it—he hates being buried under the bricks, being trapped in the rubble with sawdust kidnapping the air in his lungs.

“I miss her,” he cries, fists balled into the back of Paul’s jacket. “I miss her so _ fucking _ much!”

Paul tightens his hold and cards his fingers through his hair, whispering, “I know, love, I know,” and John wants to scream, _ You don’t! You don’t know! _ But he can’t, because Paul understands him more than anyone and that only makes him cry harder.

When his knees start to weaken, Paul eases them to the ground instead of letting him fall on his own. He curls into him, hiding like a secret in every soft corner of Paul’s body as he breaks apart. The salt of his tears sting the wounds on his face, reminding him how beaten he already was before he even arrived. 

He takes a shuddery breath and hates feeling like the man trapped inside the glass.

“I wanted to get pissed tonight and forget she existed,” he mumbles against Paul’s chest.

Paul shakes his head, kisses his hair. “It doesn’t work that way. If you force yourself to forget, then you’re just letting them die again.”

John lifts his head, looks at him with bleary eyes. “How’d you do it, then?”

“Do what?” Paul asks, gently wiping the tears from John’s cheek but neglecting the ones that spill from his own eyes.

_ “Cope.” _

“You’re not expected to just heal overnight, babe. Christ, it’s only been a month for you, and…it’s not easy. I won’t bullshit you.” He licks his lips and searches John’s eyes like the words are swimming between the tears. “But I had music, and eventually I had _ you. _ You let me into your band and made me laugh so bloody much that I couldn’t remember being sad, and the one time I really missed mum most was when I wanted her to meet you.”

“I feel like there’s so many things I needed to say to her, but every time I wanted to, I just kept puttin’ it off. I don’t even know if I told her I loved her that day. But if I had been there—” 

“Hey, no—”

“If I had just stayed a little longer or walked her home or _ been a better son, _ she’d still be here, I _ know _ she would—”

“Don’t do that, don’t blame yourself. Look at me,” he says, hand lifting John’s face and eyes so earnest it helps him remember, if just for a second, what it’s like to be full again. “It’s not your fault. There’s nothing you could’ve done, alright? _ Nothing.” _

“But…it’s just hard to convince myself of that. It’s a lot easier to blame myself for not stoppin’ it than knowing that this kinda shit is just gonna keep ‘appenin’ to me no matter what I do.” 

At night she comes to him spectral-faced and nightmarish in his dreams. Glass twinkles like barrettes in her hair, road rash and blood disfigure her face so much it hardly brings him comfort to call her mum, and the only word she ever knows is his name—soft-spoken and accusatory. He’ll jerk from his sleep with the guilt pouring off him in pools of sweat and stay awake night after night, witnessing twenty sunrises even though he’s certain there’s no light left in the world.

He remembers times when Paul will wake up in bed beside him with visions of Mary in his head, smiling patiently at John’s sleeping face until he opens his eyes and all of the memories flow slow and sweet like molasses from his lips. He wonders if it’ll ever be the same for him someday.

“It’s life, Johnny, and it’s fuckin’ shitty,” Paul tells him, sorrow perched like a crow in the crease of his brow, “but don’t ever think it’s because of anything you have or haven’t done. Yer so much stronger than you give yourself credit for, to keep carrying on like you always do despite the shit people have given you.” 

Shit, John loves him so much.

And he’s afraid that he’ll only meet the same cruel fate as all the others.

Sitting beside him to put some space between them, he looks up at the sky and wills the tears to roll back into his eyes. The smoky moon drops a crescent frown upon him that he shoulders with the weight of the stars. He’s tired of crying. He’s tired of treading lightly around the lives that mean the most to him just so they don’t fall victim to his death-touch. The fact that he’s already sitting at the mouths of graves with his lover, his mum only a few stones away, sends a long-fingered chill up his spine.

“Paul, maybe we should end this,” he mutters, eyes downcast because he knows he’ll never be able to go through with it if he looks at him and feels the love there like a hand around the throat.

“What?” Paul asks, equal parts confused and nervous.

“You and me.” He swallows, but the hand clenches, makes it difficult. “We should…stop seeing each other.”

“No.” Paul grabs his hand and, a flower opening to the sun, John’s fingers can’t resist twining with his. “You don’t mean that, why’re you sayin’ that?”

No, he doesn’t mean it. But he wishes he did. He wishes he could cut ties without a single leftover thread of hurt or regret, but sometimes he’s as selfish as those who leave him and can’t bear to give up the one person who brings him such a sense of stability. 

“I’m like, I’m like a jinx,” he says, biting the inside of his cheek. “Everyone I get close to dies, and I can’t lose you too.”

“You’re not a jinx, love,” Paul assures him gently. He kisses John’s knuckles, tightens his grip. “And I don’t plan on goin’ anywhere, alright? I won’t leave you.”

And, for the first time ever, someone wasn’t telling him that they would stay, but was convincing him that they would never leave. It was easy to fool himself into thinking that he never needed to hear those words until they were actually spoken…that he never needed anyone until Paul was actually there for him.

With an intensity emanating like white light from his innermost core, John vows, “Then I wanna tell you every fuckin’ day that I love you, because I never know anymore.”

“I love you too.” Paul kisses his cheek, the imprint of his lips a promise on John’s skin. “And I _ wish _ I could take the pain away, I really do. But you don’t have to hide it from me anymore, okay? I’m here for you.” 

Solemnly John nods.

Retreating into himself, hiding like a frightened child in the blankets of his mind, is second nature to him. Nothing can touch him there and his angry-at-the-world mask is so finely crafted that no one dares to. Now, however, he actually has to share pieces of himself with someone, and sometimes he still has trouble throwing the blankets back. 

But rather than saying anything else, he lays his head in Paul’s lap and focuses on the fingers that soon rove the messy strands of his hair and tired features of his face. With heavy eyes he stares at the cloudless charcoal sky and wonders, not for the first time, where Julia is.

If there is a heaven, John knows she’s giving it hell. Fire in her hair and brimstone in her jokes that make the angels blush the rouged color of her lips. God could never dream of kicking her out, though, because to forgo her beauty and charm would be a sin of the most damnable degree.

Then again, maybe she’s just in an alcove carved into the center of a cloud. Wrapped in a blanket of white fleece, with birds flying by to marvel at the impossible heights of a wingless creature, she looks down at him and convinces him that, even at night, the sun is only a smile away. 

John’s mouth starts moving, then he finds himself saying, “I can’t even look at girls anymore without seeing her in their faces.”

“Guess it’s a good thing yer with me, then,” Paul jokes quietly, stroking a finger down his nose. 

Tearing his eyes away from the darkness, John turns to the light, and tries a small smile on for size. Softly he answers, “Yeah. It is a good thing,” and sees the birds’ wings in the fine arch of Paul’s brows and the crests of the cloud in the roundness of his cheeks, and thinks, _ Maybe she’s inside of you. _ As that brilliant revelation nestles comfortably in the back of his mind, he adds, “‘M sorry for bein’ such a dick to you. You don’t deserve it.”

“You don’t have to apologize, love. I know what it’s like and I should’ve let you work at your own pace, y’know. It just…it killed me to see you hurting.” He gingerly touches the cut below John’s left eye, generously given by the stone of a pinky ring. “If I had known all this was gonna happen, though, I wouldn’ta asked you out.”

John sighs, tightens his lips. “I’m a fuck-up.”

“Aye, but you’re _ my _ fuck-up.” 

Grinning, Paul leans down to kiss him. 

Ever since the funeral a knife has been stabbed into John’s gut, twisting and twisting as the days without her passed; but with every touch from Paul, with every look and kiss, the blade slips out, little by little, until one day all that will remain is the scar of the memory. 

John pushes onto an elbow and keeps Paul against his lips by the fingers tangled in the back of his hair. The salvation in his kiss tastes as prominent as the coppery tang of blood had just hours earlier. His lip is still split, the blood cracked and dry, but it’s the only pain that has brought him pleasure in weeks. He tilts his head and relishes in the affection—the chaste pecks sprinkled in between the longer, slower kisses. 

Again and again he kisses his saviour. Further and further the knife slips out of him. 

_ He won’t leave me, _ John chants in his head between each kiss, an unfamiliar anthem. _ He won’t leave me. _

“Wanna go home now?” Paul asks when they part, rubs his thumb over John’s chin. “Get cleaned up?”

John pecks his lips again before answering, “In a bit, yeah?”

Though he doesn’t have the courage to express it, he wants to be with Julia just a little longer. There’s no telling when he’ll have the courage to come back. Every future visit will pale in comparison to the catharsis of this first one. But when he rests his head against Paul’s thighs again and looks over at her headstone, sat like a silent witness to this restoration of spirits, Paul strokes the soft skin behind his ear and patiently waits with him like he understands.

Finally he can see over the rim of the glass, cool and solid beneath his fingers, and into a sober world. A harsh and unforgiving world, yes. A world with millions of people, yet all he knows is abandonment. A world with loss and love, terrifying him with the arbitrary hand by which the two are dealt. 

But it’s also a world with hope and redemption and _ survival. _ With graves that yawn like the mouths of caverns yet still can’t drag him down, a sky that empathizes with the bodies it covers, and the soul of a mother that sleeps in the face of a lover. 

And it’s a hell of a lot better than the bottom of a bottle.

**Author's Note:**

> I only took a week off from writing WAS to finish up this one, so I hope you enjoyed! I love doing angsty prompts and seeing if I can break my own heart. I might be asking for some more soon and hopefully y'all will have some pretty complex ideas so I can start making them into one shots and not just ficlets. It was challenging, but I really enjoyed doing this one.
> 
> Leave a comment if you liked the angst for a change! Thanks for reading!
> 
> [primary blog](https://daisychain-unchained.tumblr.com) | [beatle blog](https://unchaineddaisychain.tumblr.com)


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